That Was Obvious
by smile7499
Summary: You've got to love the improbability drive, the epitome of randomness. And poor Arthur still can't get his tea. Crossover ficlet.
1. Default Chapter

Arthur Dent shifted the object in his left hand to his right hand. "Ford? The improbability drive is off, right?"  
  
Once again, Ford was reminded of human beings' curious tendency to state the obvious. "Yes. Everything is off, you dope. Probably Zaphod's fault somehow. Why do you ask?"  
  
"Only because this book just appeared in my hands a minute ago, and I started reading it. How improbable is that?"  
  
Ford paused thinking. Five minutes later, Trillian waved a piece of paper from a corner seat with numerous scribbles on it. "1,890,754,071 to one."  
  
"Hmm. Well, it's about this baby who destroys this rather evil wizard all by himself, and becomes famous. See?" He held a beaten up copy of a book titled "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone".  
  
Ford snorted. "C'mon, Arthur, that could never happen. You know babies have no motivation at all. Why, I can barely think of something more improbable happening."  
  
The hum of the computer suddenly started up, and Zaphod appeared. The computer's screen lit merrily, and it began to rapidly break the silence of the ship. "Hi there, guys! It's really great to be back with you again, I can tell you, and I want to say that."*  
  
Suddenly, a boy dropped onto the computer's keyboard, completely interrupting what it was going to say next. He had messy black hair, bright green eyes and a rather nasty looking scar on his forehead. He stared around at the spaceship, passing over Zaphod and then going for a second look. After a second he shrugged him off and slid to the ground. "Hey, where am I?" he said, his voice cracking a bit.  
  
"Probability 120,207,038,895,891 to one," the computer supplied helpfully, once the boy had climbed off of it.  
  
Arthur's expert ears quickly picked up on the boy's voice, and smiled broadly at the boy, which gave the boy the adverse effect of shrinking back a bit. "You wouldn't happen to have any tea with you, possibly?"  
  
The boy checked quickly in his pockets. "Not at the moment, no."  
  
"Damn," Arthur whispered sadly, and walked out the door.  
  
"It was a pleasure opening for you!" the door shouted. Arthur kicked the doorframe with his shoe before continuing away.  
  
Trillian, Ford and Zaphod left the room, yelling at the door on the way. Marvin sat in a corner and wearily shut himself off. Harry Potter was confused.  
  
"Probability of 8 to one," the computer added cheerily.  
  
Fin.  
  
* Pg 89 of "Life, the Universe and Everything." 


	2. 2

A/n- I was very, very inspired to write more.  Because my lovely friends stoked my ego.  *cough,* Emily, Tuna, and probably Chasity too.  I was told that I even sounded like Douglas Adams!  Which, you know, might not be true, but sounds very nice.  So I like it.  Here's a bit more.  I fear this is becoming a fic, rather than a ficlet.  Oh well.

A/n 2- Rachel was indeed right.  Vogon, not Vorgon.

And I don't own this stuff.

~*~

It has been said that if one is very aware, very astute, and really very smart, they will find the Universe to overall be an interesting yet dizzying experience, complete with sudden waves of nausea.  
  
Luckily, Harry didn't have this problem. Not to say that he wasn't a smart boy. No, in fact, he did have a bit of brains behind the thick, protective layer of skull that evolved from his ape-like ancestors. On Earth, before it had been destroyed, that is, anthropologists, biologists and astrologists all wondered at the form the human body had eventually taken. If they had been given the opportunity to go back in time, to the earliest days of mankind's history, they would have been most surprised. It seemed that the thick nature of a human skull was because of a curious game human ancestors used to play involving running head first into each other. Eventually, of course, human beings outgrew this behavior and turned to new, even more vile forms of sport such as cricket and even football, which interestingly enough, was quite similar to the game primitive humans used to play. Harry himself could even make a case out of his personal pastime, Quidditch, if he had been given the time or need. But none of this concerned Harry, because of his major problem.  
  
Harry was confused. And when Harry was confused, he would often make assumptions that were incorrect, such as eating an innocent cream and turning into a canary, or drinking a potion that would turn him and his friends into Slytherins, and interrogating another albeit, evil, but innocent boy named Malfoy.  
  
Not that it really mattered anymore. Slytherin was gone, and so was Malfoy.  Vaporized into thin air, along with everyone else Harry had ever known. This would have caused Harry extreme emotional distress, had he known at the time. But he didn't.  
  
Harry let out a long sigh. "I'm confused."  
  
"8 to one against," the computer reminded him.  
  
"Merlin's beard, shut up." He angrily walked out of the room, stopping for a minute to appreciate the polite manner of the door.  
  
As it had been said before, Harry wasn't too dumb, and he knew that someone in this place could give him some answers. As long as it wasn't the man with two heads, he said firmly to himself.  
  
Coincidentally, the first person that Harry ran into was that strange man who had asked for tea. The man was standing by a machine impatiently strumming his fingers against the metallic surface. Harry cleared his throat.  
  
"Oh, it's the improbable boy," Arthur remarked to the machine, which was whirring and beeping. He turned to the boy. "What is it?"  
  
"Oh!" Harry exclaimed, "I was hoping you could explain this to me."  
  
"This what?" he asked, pulling at his ragged dressing robe. Harry hadn't seemed to mind, because he was wearing something rather similar, though much less dirty and more formal, with what looked like a school crest on one side.  
  
Harry grumbled. "This place! Where am I? How did I get here? And are you trying to kill me?"  
  
The machine in front of Arthur suddenly became silent, and a cup of a brown liquid came out. "Share and enjoy," it chirped,*.  Arthur took a sip, made a face and passed it to Harry. Harry wisely declined. "Honestly, you damn machine, I already told you how to make tea! Don't you remember?"  
  
"Share and enjoy!"  
  
He turned around and surveyed Harry, who was still eyeing him warily. "First off, I don't think I'm trying to kill you. But you never do know what'll happen, so watch out. And the answer to all your other questions is the Infinite Improbability Drive."  
  
"Well that's nice and vague!" Harry sputtered.  
  
"No," Arthur corrected, "it's not very vague at all. I'll leave you to work it all out yourself." Arthur trudged out the door, holding his hands over his ears. In all honesty, he was still rather bitter about the boy not having any tea.  
  
Harry, however, was not so hypersensitive to see that not having any tea could be such an affront to the man. Surely he was just insane. That was the explanation.  He was insane, and in insanity, this all made perfect sense.  
  
Now that he stopped to think about it, how unusual was it for people to just appear and disappear? It happened all the time, in fact. Even if Harry had no choice in the matter; one minute he had been walking out of Herbology, and the next minute he had fallen onto that large computer, and this building with all of its strange inhabitants; especially the man with two heads.  
  
He sighed and followed the path the angry man had taken. It led him into a dense, humid room full of vines and trees. Over in one corner was the woman from the other room. She made a stray glance at Harry and put the book in her hand on the soft dirt of the rainforest. Its battered copy had a gleaming red Hogwarts Express on it.  The man in the robe was no where to be found.  
  
"Hello?" Harry asked tentatively. She looked over at him and stood up, grasping the thick trunk of the tree behind her. Harry had to admit that she was rather striking, though not in the way that could be described as beautiful. She couldn't be described as "pretty" either, which was what that Harry had thought of Cho, before she couldn't be near him without crying. She seemed to be very comfortable in the area around her, and she looked exceptionally calm, considering that Harry had just appeared on top of a computer in the same room as her ten minutes before hand.  But she was too old for him, he reminded himself. Even if she did have very nice brown eyes.  
  
"You're Harry, right?" she pointed to the book still lying on the ground. "I hope you don't mind me reading. It's just a highly improbable book."  
  
There was that word again. _Improbable_. "Oh, it's fine, I suppose. Is that book about me?"  
  
She nodded politely. "You seem to have taken the concept fairly well."  
  
Harry shrugged.  "I'm used to it.  So, what's your name?" he asked, sitting down on the floor of the room. He was surprised to feel the dampness of wet soil through his pants and robe.  
  
"Trillian. Sorry I didn't say that before." She sat down across from him, and sighed.  "You must be rather confused."  
  
Harry's eyes lit up. "Yes, Trillian!" he paused after he said her name. It sounded strange coming out of his mouth. "I don't know how I got here, I don't know where here is, and the man in the robe seemed angry at me."  
  
"I think Arthur was just disappointed that you didn't have any tea leaves or bags. He can't get the machine to make tea for him again. I haven't told him that Zaphod reprogrammed the machine so that it can't make tea. The last time it did, we almost were destroyed by a Vogon fleet."  
  
Harry picked serenely at the ground. "A Vogon fleet? Is that some kind of insect infestation?"  
  
She laughed. Harry thought Trilllian had a nice laugh. For a woman who was too many years older than him, most of his brain reminded itself. The other remaining part of his brain told the rest of his brain to shove off. 

"Insects? Well, no, they're very vile creatures from Vogsphere."  
  
"Where's Vogsphere?"  
  
"Oh, a few light years away. A while ago some Vogons were back over by Earth, blowing it up." Trillian gazed at the ground, digging up the soil.  
  
Harry stopped pulling plants from the ground. "Wuh," was the only thing he could say. His face went slack, and it left more of his brain able to process some of the new data Trillian had given him: 1) Vogons would not be polite guests. 2) They were light years away, so there was no worry of meeting one on the street. 3) They blew up the Earth, so there were no streets left to meet one on.  
  
Considering the severity of these facts, Harry's fainting was a rather small matter. When he woke up, Trillian was standing over him, holding an empty plastic cup with Mickey Mouse on it. His face was covered in apple juice. "Wuh?" he repeated again.  
  
"You fainted," she said matter-of-factly. She sat down again.  
  
"Yes," he said irritably wiping his face with a corner of his robe. "I was processing."  
  
Trillian made a slight noise of agreement.  
  
"But," he paused. "If the Vogons blew up Earth," he paused again, unsure of the motive, "where are we?"  
  
"We're on the Heart of Gold, jumping improbable distances across the universe because of the Infinite Improbability Drive." Trillian said it so securely that it took Harry a minute to remember that he had no idea what she was talking about.  
  
"I have no idea what you're talking about," he confided to her.  
  
"Ah," she said eloquently. "The Infinite Improbability Drive uses the power of improbability to help it travel over far distances across the Galaxy. That's how this room is here. Very improbable to find a rainforest in a spaceship, right?"  
  
Harry gawked at Trillian for a minute. "We're in space?!"  
  
"Well, where else would we be? Sometimes we land on a planet, but right now we're in space, yes."  
  
"You know," Harry stood up and wiped the back of his pants, "this is one of the stranger things that's ever happened to me."  
  
Trillian began to push herself up, too. Harry held out a hand, and he helped her up. "With the Improbability Drive, you have to count on these things.  I must say, you're taking these new ideas fairly well." 

Harry set his face straight.  "I've had practice," he said grimly.

* Page 9 and 10 "Restaurant at the of the Universe"


	3. Chapter 3

AN: I finished a fic! I am not a failure!

Okay, so I sort of write this...a year and a half ago and forgot to post it, but I still "finished" it. It was my goal this summer, the Summer of Fic! Exciting!

* * *

Trillian gestured back to the entrance. "Come on, we really shouldn't be in here while the Improbability Drive is working."

Harry sighed and got up, following Trillian out the door, which made a happy beep as they passed through it. On the way out Trillian kicked the door with her elbow. Trillian began winding her way through the ship back to the main area where Zaphod was probably watching a show, and Ford was probably sleeping.

Trillian, for all her mathematical genius, could not always be right. When they walked into the room, Zaphod's left head was immersed in an Ultra Cricket match, and Ford was looking for food.

"Where are we going?" Trillian asked Zaphod's right head. Harry found this quite disconcerting, and tried to imagine that he knew the faces on the two heads. This only made him shriek quickly in disgust when he imagined Hermione's head next to Professor Snapes'.

"Oh, Trillian. And improbable Monkeyboy," he nodded over to Harry.

"Erm, it's Harry, actually. And you are?"

"Zaphod Beeblebrox. I know, it really is an honor to meet me."

"Um. Sure."

Zaphod's left head had already lost interest in Harry and had begun to watch the game again. His right head scoffed and turned to Trillian. "We're going to Y'arthen."

"Why?" she asked.

This time it was Ford who responded. "They have the best tuna fish salad in the galaxy! Man, I'm starving." He glumly sat down on a chair and began sucking on his towel, while his chair turned into a banana.

"Three point five seven eight to the twenty-third power to one against," the computer supplied.

Zaphod's right head gave a quick nod to the gleaming computer. "The best thing I ever stole, right Trillian?"

She nodded. "It really is a technological wonder."

Harry sat down in a chair nearby the banana, noting its sweet, accurate smell and coloring.

Harry had gone through a very traumatic last half an hour. First he had lost ten house points in Herbology because he dropped his potted Death Snare, only to disappear from Hogwarts and find out that the world was destroyed for no reason that he had been given yet. And he had just been called "Monkeyboy" by a man with two heads. If he was a normal sort of person, this would have caused him to probably have a fit of sobs. Instead, he turned into a ham sandwich.

"Seven to the power of thirty four to one against," the computer said.

Trillian looked sadly at the sandwich. She had liked the kid a bit. He was slow on the uptake, but seemed like he could have enjoyed being a traveler around the Universe, on only forty bucks a day.

Zaphod's left head was too involved in the game to care, but the right head distantly felt a sense of regret that the human had not turned into roast beef.

Ford registered that a ham sandwich had appeared next to his banana, with a nice side of French fries and a pickle. He was too hungry to think of the cosmic implications.

Harry Potter knew none of this. Instead, he noted that he was lying in the grass outside of Herbology and there was dew on his clothing and a group of teachers staring at him with queer looks. Again, he was confused. And, as he later told Professor McGonagal, had a strange loss of memory from the time he left Herbology to the moment he woke up in the mud. Snape had screwed up his face and given him a detention. Life was as normal as it could be at Hogwarts.

And in the _Heart of Gold,_ a few rooms away from Trillian, Zaphod and Ford, poor Arthur was trying to brew tea out of bits paper and beef bullion cubes.

* * *

AN: I hope you enjoyed (three years later...er, sorry about that). As for Harry, I still hold the conviction that he's not a particularly intelligent person, which explains why he didn't just poof some tea for Arthur in the first place.

**Read and Review!**


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